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Rainbow capitalism is bad, duh! It’s despicable to hawk merchandise to an oppressed population while intending to turn that profit toward furthering said population’s oppression via donations to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians, among other things. But in our current dystopian nightmare, purchasing power is power, and there’s a strange, if numbing, sense of comfort in realizing that we are now a legitimate niche market rather than an aberration to be shunned altogether. In other words, Pride merchandise is at once a curious sign of progress and a harbinger of the end times. At the very least we can have a little discourse about it… as a treat.
Behind even the cringiest recent attempts at corporate queer acknowledgment there’s typically a team of real people trying to do something good, as preposterous as their efforts might seem once they get noticed by Twitter. We’re all toiling away somewhere to feed ourselves, and it’s worth remembering that even IKEA's bisexual couch has a human story buried betwixt its cushions. That’s why, barring overt cases of hypocrisy, I mostly end up judging Pride merch on its aesthetic merits: Would I wear it? Or, in the case of Listerine, would I gargle with it?
On that front, corporate Pride promotions often evoke a fond sense of under-rested, over-caffeinated art-school nostalgia: most of the products look like the output of people working under tight time limits to cram truly enormous emotional and contextual meaning into absurdly inadequate visual objects. The results are often hilarious! As Pride month once again draws to a close, let’s take a moment to look back on past and present treasures of the genre through my favorite way to cope with the end of everything: astrology.
Read on to learn which questionable Corporate Pride Promotion represents your sign of the zodiac!
Click here to jump to a sign: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.
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Aries is loud. Aries moves fast! Aries is really just here for the crashes. Aries is NASCAR’s YASCAR, hunty!!!
Ram signs love to provoke assholes through the sheer power of existing fabulously — and as every queer person who grew up in NASCAR track towns in the ’90s can recall, bigoted fans of the zoom-zoom go-fast cars are notoriously easy to rile. At that time, homophobes often fretted that Jeff Gordon’s striped “rainbow” DuPont racing suit looked (pejoratively) “gay.” Well, guess what shitheads! Be it humanitarian progress, late-stage capitalism, or the unholy combination of both in which we currently exist, the entire organization of NASCAR is now officially, openly gay-loving!
All that relentless left-turning is finally inching the company away from its traditional association with the hateful discrimination of right-wing racing (and racism) enthusiasts! The YAAASCAR Racing snapback cap (official or homemade bootleg version) is the accessory of the summer for spring-born potential collision participants.
Fixed earth sign Taurus is known to prize luxury and comfort. That’s why Taurus is the Ugg Fluff Yeah sandal slipper slides. They’re an elastic-slingback house slipper made from the hide of a Muppet, but with a sturdy rubber outsole so you can wear them out to take your garbage to the curb, or to attend a wedding or — if you are my editor, apparently — to Them’s Now Awards.
The less-fluffy (and not-gay) version is slightly cheaper, and even on sale in some shades, which could be chalked up to corporate rainbow tax, but is more likely because this shoe-bomination is objectively hideous in monochrome neutrals and only becomes truly resplendent when rendered in profuse rainbow fur. Ugg also offers this most Taurean of shoes in baby sizes, which, given the rate at which infant humans grow, plus their relative lack of need for shoes and propensity for mess-making, ranks this up among the top most frivolous items you could spend $65 dollars plus tax and shipping on…..but just look at the smallness, and the fluff! 🥺 Those are shoes for the lil baby who lives in the heart of every Taurus.
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Gemini is always the over-explaining person orating away contentedly about a totally incongruous topic in any given social situation, and that’s why Gemini is 2019’s Budweiser U.K.’s Fly the Flag campaign cups. Meant to raise awareness, the cups came accompanied by tweets and posters featuring explanations for each color of each flag and their relevance to the identity they represent. Perhaps the company thought London Pride-goers needed a quick refresher course on their own flags, or maybe they intended to educate ignorant straight fans of affordable beer. Regardless, educational queer Budweiser cups are CAMP!!! Absolutely incredible. Please release the queer identity explainer cups again for Pride 2023, Budweiser; maybe this time pass them out from Pride flag regalia-ed Clydesdale-drawn carriages with banners trailing behind them explaining the significance of every color.
Cancer is soft, Cancer is cuddly, Cancer is comforting, but then sometimes out of nowhere Cancer clutches the person nearest them with dozens of grabby hands and whispers some fucked-up shit like “nobody believes you.” Cancer, obviously, is the entirety of IKEA Canada’s 2021 Pride Love Seats collection. Aside from the cheerfully terrifying bisexual couch, most of the entries trend to pastel-flavored cozy, with a little extra spice here and there: the nonbinary sofa is a fan of harnesses and the Two-Spirit slip-cover passive aggressively forces anyone sitting on the right-hand side to slide into the center cushion crack.
And then there’s some serious statement pieces, like the asexual love seat with its George O’Keeffe-esque ruffle. The Progress Pride flag furniture in particular all but screams, "You may admire me, but do not even think about touching, much less sitting on me!”
The Pride Love Seat project is an incredibly Cancerian endeavor all around, even when it overswings in astonishingly wild directions. Congrats on powerfully interpreting the season, IKEA Canada!
Burger King Austria has drawn attention this summer with their “equal sides” double-top bun or double-bottom bun Pride Whopper, but the crown jewel of Burger King’s LGBTQ+ promotional efforts is the Whopper Diamond.
In 2019, Burger King Germany funded and filmed a wedding ceremony for Dima and Alvar, who were not permitted to legally marry (or even hold hands in public!) in their own country. They are lovely people, it was a beautiful ceremony; sincerest congratulations to the couple! The bizarre part of the endeavor is the provenance of the wedding jewelry. Unsatisfied with merely catering the event, Burger King also provided the bling by GRILLING A WHOPPER INTO CARBON and having it COMPRESSED INTO DIAMONDS FOR THE RINGS!!!
The resultant advertisement transcends its crass commercial medium to deliver an emotional journey worthy of preservation in a fine art museum. The juxtaposition of pure, wrongfully forbidden human love with footage of a Whopper being burned black and ground to powder with a mortar and pestle by an anonymous individual wearing full Willy Wonka Television Room protective gear simply has to be seen to be believed.
Tears of hysterical laughter at the Whopper-to-gemstone processing sequences blend into wellings of genuine emotion as Dima toasts Alvar with tiny Whopper sliders and Alvar declares of Dima, “This is my diamond.” Magnificent!
Anyway, that’s Leo: a Burger King Whopper diamond.
Perfectionist, work-prioritizing Virgo is the Microsoft Teams Pride Month 2022 theme gallery.
Per a friend who uses Teams at their job, the Pride theme is hilariously understated from the user end, merely changing the Chat icon to a subtle rainbow pattern. That’s very Virgo. Particular about the organization of their visual spaces, they tend toward minimalism in designated work areas. It’s the collection of custom Pride backgrounds for Teams meetings, however, that land the theme unassailably in the center of mutable earth sign territory.
“Create a welcoming space by choosing from 36 evocative 3D backgrounds for your video calls inspired by the flags of LGBTQIA+ communities,” reads the copy on the website. “Evocative?” Absolutely. “Welcoming?” Um….well. Click through and take a look at the collection for yourself.
I’m shaking with delighted laughter envisioning the icon who would show up to an all-hands meeting led by, say, the conservative CEO of their paper company, bordered by an inclusive Pride explosion with the words “NO TO WAR” emblazoned along the edge of it. That is so Virgo, to keep internal systems clean and uncluttered only to externally launch a beyond-passive-into-massive-aggressive display of their personal ethos in order to attract allies and destabilize enemies.
Other backgrounds in the collection are actually quite appealing as artwork! The macro Pride flag-colored collections of tactile materials are fascinating to gaze at, but could potentially cause sensory issues for sensitive Teammates on sight.
There is never consensus within a group of Libras: they’re all swinging somewhere along the arc of their own eternal internal paths toward balance, and they’re never all at the same place in the scale at the same time. But all Libras enjoy wordplay, and that’s why they either love or loathe (but for the purposes of this list, are all represented by) the concept of the Marks & Spencer lettuce, bacon, guacamole, and tomato LGBT Pride sandwich.
Just think of the possibilities if M&S were to add ingredients representative of further identities! Quinoa, queso, quail egg? Irish soda bread or iced coffee on the side? Apple slices, anchovy? Pepperoni for pan people? It feels sort of harmlessly offensive and a bit grudgingly wholesome to be celebrated by a sandwich. Does the “little mayo” in the original creation represent the overarching spirit of Britain, where the sandwich is sold? If you add mustard in addition to the mayonnaise does that make the sandwich m4m? What does the M&S Pride sandwich have to say about Burger King Austria’s double-top and -bottom Whoppers? I feel like the platonically perfect Pride sandwich is possible, but far beyond my imaginative capability. It will have to be designed by a Libra.
Scorpio already naturally exudes pheromones at the level of strength that middle school boys of the early 2000s tried to achieve with AXE. Remember how they whipped the caps off of their evocatively named fragrance canisters and drenched their bodies in an amount of cologne only previously ever applied by Charles Bronson in this 1976 Mandom commercial? Fun times.
Scorpios also don’t like to be too easily accessible. This is why Scorp is the elusive AXE Unite Love Is Love body spray/deodorant, apparently only (at some point?) (temporarily?) available in Europe. Mysterious evidence of past thirst traps remains available in odd niches of the internet, while discontinued cast-offs are available sporadically on eBay. Reviews from the Netherlands indicate that AXE Unite smells excellent, but good luck catching it in any major metropolitan area of the U.S. when it doesn't want to be found.
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Sagittarius is hot. Sagittarius is large. Sagittarius daringly sways on the tightrope of good taste! Sagittarius is Chipotle’s 2015 “¿Homo estás?” rainbow burrito promotional tweet following the Supreme Court ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges. Was this tweet a self-interested and frankly bizarre response to news of the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States? Yes. Does this tweet remain a standing legend setting a stratospheric bar for gut-busting hilarity on social media? EMPHATICALLY yes, mostly due to the dubiously respectful but celebratory fashion in which it was deployed.
The blurred gradient on the burrito wrapper rather than the distinct stripes of the 1978 rainbow pride flag makes the whole image inestimably funnier on a subconscious level. The right tip of the foil is extra-spectral magenta, implying the presence of a second prism overlapping its red band with the violet of the first! In a grandly Sagittarian manner, Chipotle has boldly claimed the entire visible spectrum of light on behalf of the queers. ¿Homo estás? Very well, thank you INDEED!
Capricorns aren’t impressed by big, performative gestures. The most elaborate, expensive attempt to dazzle a cardinal earth sign individual might earn a mild eyebrow raise of approval, but will ultimately be checked off as yet another item on the day’s to-do list before Capricorn goes to bed at a reasonable hour to get up and work again tomorrow. What Capricorns really value is dependability and steadfastness. Reliable dental hygiene is a bonus. This is why Capricorn is the Listerine Care With Pride mouthwash bottle.
Capricorns find the fact of their own sexual identities to be rather mundane. They’re here, they’re queer, they’re killing extraneous oral bacteria by swishing mouthwash! But even the brief instances in which they allow a little whimsy to slip in through the cracks of their pragmatic personalities also tend toward the prosaic. The Listerine Pride bottle draws its share of guff from flashier signs, who prefer to see themselves represented more glamorously, but it’s during the five-ish minutes that a Cap spends brushing and flossing in front of the bathroom mirror twice a day when they might actually briefly think of themselves rather than their productivity. And now, amid that routine, they can smile at the thought that a design team for an antiseptic mouthwash brand created a tacky bottle while thinking of them.
They’re strange people, Capricorns, but weirdly heartwarming.
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Aquarians, eternal contrarians, are Pride Month special edition colorless Skittles. “Only one rainbow matters,” states the packaging, presumably referring to the Pride flag rainbow rather than any of the other spectra perceived when the sun is lower than 42° elevation above the horizon and shines through raindrops falling along a cone of 40-42° (or 50-53° for a secondary double rainbow) measured from the shadow of the observer’s head. Only slightly cheapened by the addendum “during Pride,” this is a noble sentiment.
In practice, however, the colorless Skittles are a total troll: the pale grey Pride candies are the same flavors as the usual pack, but they’re all the same (lack of) color! Surprise, bitches: when you pop a pack of Pride Skittles you can still taste the rainbow, but you can’t tell which stripe/s you’re gonna get in any given bite on sight!
You just know some intrepid Aquarius must have been the one to float this idea during the original marketing meeting: “How will we set ourselves apart from other rainbow-covered products during Pride month, you ask? We’ll eliminate the rainbow ENTIRELY!” And it just gets funnier the longer they stick to the plan. After adjusting slightly following criticism of the initial all-white color scheme, Skittle just keeps at it with the original message each June. If you’re into surprise Skittle tastings, the bag designs this year are actually pretty cute!
Though it is still a lesser-loved brand of sparkling water, thus far failing to achieve the effortless level of adoration from the queer community as to inspire its own musical ode, bubly™ sparkling water nonetheless doggedly continues to appeal to the affections of LGBTQ+ people. Pisces is the 2019 Bubly Sparkling Water All For Love 18 Can Variety Pack: effervescent, flavorful, appealingly packaged, capable of inflicting heartburn if consumed too quickly in too-great quantity! Like a Pisces, sparkling water is refreshing when chill, but can turn downright unpleasant if left to sit out unattended in the heat.
At any rate, it’s been five years now since “LaCroix Boi” was released. It’s high time for some Pisces out there to create a Bubly-themed track, if only for the opportunity of attempting to one-up Big Dipper’s spectacular carbonated water-can coat from the video with the added design potential of jewel-toned Bubly package shades.
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